84 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
Cellarius, Christophe
A prominent late 18th-century French geographer who made a public state-
ment supporting the historical credibility of Plato’s Atlantis based on evidence he
found in the fragments of ancient maps.
(See de Gisancourt)Cerne
A name by which Atlantis was once known, according to the 1st-century B.C.
geographer Diodorus Siculus. “Cerne” is also the name of a prehistoric hill-figure
in Dorset, England. The 180-foot image of a naked man wielding a club in his
right hand probably was made to represent Gogmagog, a giant said to have been
armed with an immense war club. If so, then the bioglyph’s Atlantean identity
comes into focus. In Celtic myth, Gogmagog was a leader of Britain’s first
inhabitants, descendants from the Titan Albion, brother of Atlas, like the giant
Fomors, the earliest residents of Ireland. Culture-bearers from Atlantis arriving
in several other parts of the world, as far away as the shores of Peru, were often
described in local folk memory as “gigantic.”Chac
A rain-god, or more appropriately, the sky-god worshiped by the Mayas. They
portrayed him in temple art as a bearded man with a long nose and supporting the
heavens on his shoulders, like the eponymous and sacred mountain from which
the island of Atlantis derived its name: Atlas. Chac sometimes appears Christ-like
in wall paintings, as he bears a cross on his back. But it was actually a symbol for
the four cardinal directions, defining Chac’s origin at the center of the world, just
as Atlantis was located between of the Old and New Worlds. Chac is perhaps
identical to Bacab, because he also was four divine persons in one, each “chac”
representing a particular point of the compass. They appeared in symbolic red
for east, black for west, white for north, and yellow for south. These colors
corresponded to the directions personified by the chacs. White seems associated
with the snow and ice far above the Rio Grande River. Yellow perhaps signified
the intense heat of the sun toward the Equator. If these interpretations are
correct, then the Mayas possessed far wider knowledge of the world beyond their
home in the Lowland Yucatan than credited by conventional archaeologists.
The West is universally regarded as a place of death (the dying sun, etc.),
hence its black characterization. Red is a color often associated with Atlantis,
where Plato wrote that its public and even some of its private buildings were made
of red stone, or volcanic tufa. The Atlanteans themselves were said to have been
red-haired. But the color more probably refers to sunrise.